This invention relates generally to power plants, and more particularly to modular modeling of power plants.
Some known power plants include a number of major components, for example, a gas turbine, a heat recovery steam generator, a steam turbine, and a condenser/cooling tower. To assess the performance of the power plant each of the major components are analyzed, for example, using modeling techniques. Because the configuration of major components can vary from power plant to power plant, custom models for each power plant are developed that take into account the specific configurations of the major component of the specific power plant. The development of plant specific models incurs high costs and considerable time.
Some modeling systems have attempted to embed alternate configurations of some major components in a single model. However, this approach produces a very complex model that can result in longer times to solve the model, i.e., longer convergence times.